446 Quotes by Adrienne Rich

We murmur moonwords.

You: a woman too oldfor passive contemplation caught staring out a window at bird-of-paradise spikes jewelled with rain, across an alley

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

The retreat into sameness—assimilation for those who can manage it—is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.

There is nothing North Americans seem to fear so much as manipulation, probably because at some level we know that we belong to a deeply manipulative system.

Perhaps many white North Americans fear an overtly political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are “rationally” against; it might get us on a level we have lost touch with; undermine the safety we have built for oneselves, remind us of what is better left forgotten.

You ask me how I'm going to live the rest of my life Well, nothing is predictable with pain Did the old poets write of this? —in its odd spaces, free, many have sung and battled—But I'm already living the rest of my life not under conditions of my choosingwired into pain rider on the slow train

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

I refuse to become a seeker for cures.Everything that has ever helped me has come through what alreadylay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong across my heart. This is from wheremy strength comes, even when I miss my strengtheven when it turns on melike a violent master.